


What Lies In the Shadows of the Bars: Asura can be homeless and hungry, too.

by Kazukoh (NihileNOPE)



Series: #TyriasLibraryEvent [1]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Despair, Gen, Homelessness, Hope, Poverty, Starvation, Writing Prompt, brief mention of PTSD, brief mention of captivity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 22:35:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20089882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NihileNOPE/pseuds/Kazukoh
Summary: Written for #tyriaslibraryevent. Takes place during Phoenix 1331 AE (approximately April 2018).





	What Lies In the Shadows of the Bars: Asura can be homeless and hungry, too.

There were times of feast, and times of famine.

This was one of the latter.

I could feel fog encroaching in my mind. My great mind, the most important thing to an Asura, clouded with the fog of hunger. While that did occasionally happen back before everything happened, it’s only grown worse since then. As someone who has to eat at least once every two hours, in quantities more akin to that of a Norn or a Charr as opposed to one of my own kind, it’s to expected.

So was the blackness of unconsciousness.

I was already recovering from nearly dying from starvation-or more accurately, from hypoglycemic shock, courtesy of an Inquest who wished to study me-study my appetite, the illness that causes it, anything they could use.

An incident that keeps me awake at night.

I tried to reach from underneath the staircase near one of the structures at Plikter’s, but I barely had the energy this time. My bony hand could barely grasp the tile nearby, could barely drag me further.

The dumpster is so close, yet so far away. The hope of even a small snack, maybe a meal, lay inside that metal container.

Alchemy, please, don’t have let the janitorial Golems incinerated its contents yet.

One tile. Two tiles. Three tiles.

I counted them, trying to keep my hopes up. Trying to keep myself conscious.

Four. Five. Six.

I could feel myself gasping for breath, exhausted just from this. I couldn’t just stand up and walk, my legs were jelly.

Jelly….that sounds delicious.

Seven…eight……nine…….

Ten…eleven….twelve….

thirteen……

fourteen…..

fifteen…..

Perhaps….I’ll nap….here…..

I need to regain some strength before I try scaling it. At two feet even, despite my age of 18, it’s still horrifically tall.

No…I can’t. I can’t stop no-

The next thing I know it was later in the day. I was still lying by the garbage receptacle. I didn’t feel any better, but I felt much, much worse.

Glancing upwards, I accurately deduced, through the continuing mental fog, dizziness and lightheaded-ness, that the structure was 152.4 centimeters tall. However, the calculation took two whole minutes, instead of the mere seconds that it would take to a genius in a better state.

I climbed. And climbed. And climbed. Pieces of my brittle claws broke off, the stumps bleeding, my aching muscles screaming, or at least what was left of them after they may have begun to waste away.

The climb felt like hours. But it might’ve been minutes. I don’t know.

Inside, alongside the many disposables of Asura life…was a lifeline. A spark of light in the darkness.

It was half of a moa burger.


End file.
